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Missing the Mark on Culture
The blog “Are Marketers Missing the Mark?” by Hispanic Market Weekly has stated that “An attitudes-based acculturation model provides a more focused lens for looking at Latinos and capturing the estimated $500 billion in purchasing power held by bicultural Hispanics” based on a report from Culturati Research & Consulting.
Let’s clarify that the largest percentage of bilingual Latinos/Hispanics do not need to acculturate; they enculturate instead. They acquire the culture in their first years of life through schooling and media in English. Acculturation is for people such as immigrants who move from one society or culture into another.
Ethnic marketing is prone to these wrong and misleading statements. Let’s also clarify that Hispanic marketers are not experts in cross-cultural theories or cultural anthropology and should not be haphazardly using terms that are outside their field or field-specific that they ignore. They need to either learn more about social sciences or leave such studies to the experts because they are “missing the mark.”
Targeting Latino Youth in the Digital Age
My academic research paper “Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing: Targeting Latino Youth in the Digital Age” has been published on the first issue of the Journal of Internationalisation and Localisation (JIAL).
You can access it with six more articles as a PDF or, you can purchase the journal from the publishing university at http://www.lessius.eu/jial/order.aspx
The George Lopez Phenomenon
By Mari D. González
As a Mexican household name who has made it into the English-language media, George Lopez is mainstreaming Latinos for which he is considered by many a hero. He uses the most recognizable and marketable Latino symbol —Spanish language— just enough to remind you that he is one from the hood. He is not political correct. He can dispose of cursing republicans publicly and yet, he has a large following across blacks, whites, Asians, and Latinos alike.
So, What Is His Formula?
His Lopez Tonight Show is multicultural. He brings in and interviews white- and black-American celebrities. His diverse band plays diverse music and more importantly, he gets into issues that are close to Latinos and working-class Americans openly.
He brings in the urban flair popular among younger generations which has given way to fashionable music including regaetton, rap, and hip pop. He invites regular people to his show and make them feel at home, showing them respect and consideration.
He dresses elegantly. His shows around the country are sold-out, “even in a down economy” as he put it. His state-of-the-art studio is filled up with young people of all shades who will certainly come out with additional Spanish-language words that they did not or would not learn from their Spanish high school teacher.
Exploiting Culture and Humor
He brings racial issues into the open and even asks his guests for their opinion on them. He can certainly poke at Latinos and for that matter, working-class blacks and whites alike, because he is one of them. He grew up with those experiences; he is an insider and cannot be guilty of prejudice. He can be forgiven by those he represents for he talks about what he lived and endured. He is one of them thus, he can laugh at them.
There is a free flow at his shows. He converses with his audience and feels equally comfortable interviewing Clint Eastwood or the black pregnant dancer in a Corona bikini. He swiftly shifts between social classes and across ethnicities and that is a real skill.
He is attempting to demystify the difference between one’s ethnic label in the U.S. and one’s DNA. And, whether or not he is accurate, it is not the issue. The issue is that he is starting up these conversations in English-language national media.
De or Re-politicizing Chicanos
He is depoliticizing the term “Chicano” by calling himself “Tall, Dark and Chicano” among his fans who are beyond Latinos. Yet, he makes you feel that the Low Rider is still cool while he angrily gets into the political debate as to why some republicans did not vote for Sotomayor.
He might no be the funniest of all or even funny at all but, he has what a great majority of the U.S., so called, minorities have been waiting for –a charming, dark-skinned guy from a poor upbringing who is still in touch with his parent’s culture and has been able to secure a spot not in ethnic but in regular mainstream media where many with more influence have not made it.
Forget about his humor, which I can only stand for a few minutes, that ranges from off-color, vulgar, and borders black comedy. Even for those who find his jokes offensive, he is still looked up to and respected for he can definitely arouse multicultural crowds.
Nota en español sobre “Spanglish”
Page 51 of Book IX from the Florentine Codex. The text is in Nahuatl written with a Latin script. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Escrito por Mari D. González
De acuerdo a mi último estudio, los jóvenes quienes aprenden español en su casa – ya sea porque sus padres se lo exigen o porque sus padres no hablan ingles- y que aprendieron ingles a temprana edad, prefieren, al hablar casualmente con sus amigos(as), usar las palabras y frases en español que aprendieron en casa y mezclarlas con términos o frases en ingles que aprendieron en la escuela.
Este proceso de “back and forth” de una lengua a otra no necesariamente incluye palabras comúnmente conocidas como Spanglish.
En mi opinión, las palabras en español inglesadas o anglicismos denotan conceptos nuevos o variaciones de conceptos ya conocidos que se añaden al vocabulario en el lenguaje que fueron aprendidas manteniendo el sonido español por la popularidad de su uso y la funcionalidad que ofrecen.
El use de Spanglish es más común en los mexicanos quienes nos aferramos a un español menos castellano y más Náhuatl y en personas para quienes no es práctico buscar en el diccionario español-ingles la traducción al español de palabras nuevas en ingles.
Latino or Hispanic
Last year, I wrote a paper for school on the meaning of the terms Latino and Hispanic according to the people being categorized. Aside from the literature review, I interviewed eight self-identified Latinos or Hispanics and these were my findings.
Since its inception by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget in 1977, the term Hispanic has been both controversial and accepted by different circles to categorize people with ancestry in Spain and Spanish-speaking countries of the Western hemisphere. Some argue that choosing one label over the other is a matter of assimilation while others choose a label to state pride of having developed an agreeable ethnic identity. Several authors (Martin, 2005; Acuña, 2000; Gonzales, 1999; Rodriguez, 2007) acknowledge the political implications behind the choice of a specific label. Martin (2005) in particular proposes to analyze the term Latino in the context of “reinterpretation” of an existing name that has sprung from political movements dating back to the 1960’s (p. 397). Other researchers (Korzenny & Korzenny, 2005; Rodriguez, 2007; Davila, 2001) recognize a different and significant dynamic – the capitalizing of the consumer power through the use of the label Hispanic which is representative of a common linguistic indicator.
The term Hispanic is inaccurate because is not perceived by the receivers as representative of their “broader culture” and because it implies that “all” Latino/Hispanic speak Spanish. The term Hispanic does however speak of the Spanish colonization from which the Spanish language was instituted. Yet, not all people who live in Latin America speak Spanish such as the many Indigenous people across the continent. The term Hispanic however, is seen as convenient through the use of census data to make the case for the allocation of funds that support language-based social service programs and for marketers and advertisers to sell Spanish media programs by arguing that if not all, the majority of Hispanics prefer to speak Spanish.
Individuals who are more aware of the labels’ socio-politics argue that neither the term Hispanic nor Latino applies to them because they want to distance themselves from the negative stereotypes more commonly attached to Mexican immigrants and people of Mexican descent who have dealt with a second colonization by historically being categorized as second-class group since the time their first-class citizenship rights were stripped off them in the nineteen century when the U.S. west border moved further south.
Californians in contrast to New Mexicans prefer using the term Latino(a) when given the choice between Latino(a) and Hispanic. For more educated Californians, “Latino” is the new Chicano in that it evokes their indigenous roots, a shared history of struggle and the colonization of the people in Latin American countries. Latino as a term is self-appropriated; it comes from the people which might have been the legacy from the Chicano movement. It is not surprising that Latinos in California are more aware of the political connotation of the term Latino because Chicano studies departments are at many state universities in the Southwestern United States, particularly in California.
Hispanic Marketing and Cultural Relevance
By Mari D. González
In the past four years, I have studied how effectively cultural research has been utilized by marketers to target ethnic groups, specifically Latinos/Hispanics in the U.S. On my most recent research, I focused on youth because they represent a demographic group that is bilingual and bicultural and because they are most susceptible to new trends and technology.
I investigated the type of cultural knowledge marketing researchers use to target Latino/Hispanic youth and the effectiveness of their interactive advertising campaigns. The study explored how the ever-growing access to digital media changed the way the food and beverage companies do business with Latino/Hispanic youth. The purpose of the study was to provide further understanding on marketing to U.S. Latinos particularly acculturated youth who shift back and forth between two cultures and that has shaped the focus of my academic research.
The study was presented at the LISA Forum Berkeleyand the academic paper was published at the Journal for Internationalisation and Localisation at Lessius Hogeschool in December, 2009.
